Posts Tagged ‘hunger’
Gov’ts Fail to Invest in Hungriest, Poorest Regions Creating Crisis After Crisis
By Stephen Leahy
CHANGWON, South Korea, Oct 21, 2011 (IPS)
For millennia, people have coped with drought in the Horn of Africa, comprised mainly of drylands. Yet today, more than 13 million people there are starving because of political instability, poor government policies and failure to invest in the world’s poorest people, say experts here in Changwon.
2.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid is needed to cope with a devastating hunger crisis in parts of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.
Two billion people, half of whom are extremely impoverished, live in drylands around the world, according to Anne Juepner of the Drylands Development Centre at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Nairobi.
“Drylands are not wastelands, as is often thought. More than half of the world’s cattle, sheep, goats and most of its grains are grown in drylands,” Juepner told IPS in an interview outside of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification 10th Conference of the Parties (COP 10) in Changwon.
Juepner is here to launch UNDP’s “The Forgotten Billion”, a report to call attention to the fact that despite its productivity, drylands that comprise one third of the world’s land mass are also home to world’s poorest and most at-risk people. Read the rest of this entry »
Rampant Speculation Inflated Food Price Bubble – Wall St./Grain Traders Pushing Price Rises
“Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem”
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS)
Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative “food bubble” that’s created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude.
[This is the second of a multi-part series investigating what is driving food prices higher]
Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.
Now they’ve turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
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Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say.
“There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world’s poorest people,” said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada in reference to the estimated one billion people who go hungry.
“Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem,” Fox told IPS. Read the rest of this entry »
In Corrupt Global Food System, Farmland Is the New Gold and Africans the New Share-croppers
$ Billions Made Speculating on Food
“Africans have become share-croppers, exporting coffee, cotton, flowers and now food while going hungry”
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 13, 2011 (IPS)
Famine-hollowed farmers watch trucks loaded with grain grown on their ancestral lands heading for the nearest port, destined to fill richer bellies in foreign lands. This scene has become all too common since the 2008 food crisis.
[This is the first of a multi-part series investigating what is driving food prices higher]
Food prices are even higher now in many countries, sparking another cycle of hunger riots in the Middle East and South Asia last weekend. While bad weather gets the blame for rising prices, the instant price hikes of recent times are largely due to market speculation in a corrupt global food system.
The 2008 food crisis awoke much of the world’s investment community to the profitable reality that hungry people will do almost anything, even sell their own children, in order to eat. And with the global financial crisis, food and farmland became the “new gold” for some of the biggest investors, experts agree.
In 2010, wheat futures rose 47 percent, U.S. corn was up more than 50 percent, and soybeans rose 34 percent.
This independent environmental journalism depends on public support. Click here learn more.
On Wednesday, U.S.-based Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, announced a tripling of profits. The firm generated 1.49 billion dollars in three months between September and November 2010.
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Bills pay a return of less than one percent. Read the rest of this entry »
Ending Africa’s Hunger Means Listening to Local Farmers Instead of Agribusiness
Africa is hungry – 240 million people are undernourished.
“Africa has enormous quantities of land and resources…and now there is a stampede to lock those up.”
By Stephen Leahy
NAGOYA, Japan, Oct 16, 2010 (IPS)
Africa is hungry – 240 million people are undernourished. Now, for the first-time, small African farmers have been properly consulted on how to solve the problem of feeding sub-Saharan Africa. Their answers appear to directly repudiate a massive international effort to launch an African Green Revolution funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Instead of new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, family farmers in West Africa said they want to use local seeds, avoid spending precious cash on chemicals and most importantly to direct public agricultural research to meet their needs, according to a multi-media publication released on World Food Day (Oct. 16).
“There is a clear vision from these small farmers. They are rejecting the approach of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,” said report co-author Michel Pimbert of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a non-profit research institute based in London.
“These were true farmer-led assessment where small farmers and other food producers listened and questioned agricultural and other experts and then came up with their own recommendations,” Pimbert told IPS.
“Food and agriculture policy and research tend to ignore the values, needs, knowledge and concerns of the very people who provide the food we all eat — and often serve instead powerful commercial interests such as multinational seed and food retailing companies,” he said.
This independent environmental journalism depends on public support. Click here learn more.
Read the rest of this entry »
Free Markets Cause Chronic Hunger in Africa — There’s Plenty of Food but No Money
Written a few years ago but still relevant today. Ideology causes hunger not lack of food.
Free Markets Cause Chronic Hunger in Africa — There’s Plenty of Food but No Money
By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 20, 2006 (IPS)
[World Bank and International Monetary Fund free-market doctrines responsible for much of Africa's hunger experts say]
It is a world of paradox and plenty:
852 million people are starving while one billion people are overweight, with 300 million of them considered medically obese.
And the numbers of people whose health are at serious risk due to starvation or from obesity is rising rapidly.
While what the World Health Organisation calls a global epidemic of obesity is a health issue of the modern world, hunger and malnutrition are old and bitterly intractable problems.
More than 50 million Africans currently need food assistance, according to the U.N. World Food Programme. More than 120 million Africans are living permanently on the edge of emergency food aid, says the British charity CARE International.
Why is hunger chronic in Africa?
“There is enough food, but people don’t have enough money to buy it,” says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based policy think tank on social, economic and environmental issues.
“Sixty-three percent of people in Niger live on less than a dollar a day,” Mittal told IPS.
Hunger is mainly the result of poverty.
Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that th
ere is enough food to give everyone in the world more than 2,700 calories a day, she says. Read the rest of this entry »
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